Did the hefty check you received in the mail recently to be a mystery shopper seem too good to be true? It probably was.

The Tooele City Police Department has recently uncovered a scam in which consumers were sent a large check — ranging from $2,800 to $4,700 — and asked to cash the check, keep a couple hundred dollars for themselves, and immediately wire the remainder back to the sender. Then the consumer is encouraged to go shopping and make note of customer service and store cleanliness for the stores they patronize.

The opportunity to shop on someone else’s tab sounds like a good deal, but Tooele City Police Detective Aaron Shepard said the offer is everything but that.

“The checks are counterfeit,” Shepard said, adding that six cases have come into his department in the last week. “Some people actually cashed the check and others just turned it into us as suspicious.”

Shepard believes the checks are being mailed from Canada and other countries outside the United States, although one was postmarked in Texas.

“A lot of the letters will have grammatical errors because you will have people from other countries trying to put them together. That’s one of the red flags,” Shepard said. “The other red flag is that it’s too good to be true.”

In the past, the elderly have largely been victims of direct mail scams, but this time even people in their 20s and 30s were reeled in.

Despite being mailed from different addresses, Shepard said all of the letters he had turned over to him appear to be from the same organization because of the similar way they read.

After a consumer wires back a large portion of money from their own account, they learn that the counterfeit check has not cleared, leaving them holding the bag for goods purchased as well as the wire transfer. Then the scammer typically changes addresses and phone numbers, Shepard said.

“That’s when the paper trail goes all over the place,” Shepard said. “It makes it hard to track them down.”

Shepard said investigators will try to follow the leads as far as they can, but being so far removed from the scammers’ actual location and the fact that they are constantly moving from place to place makes it extremely difficult to get very far.

“If I can get phone numbers, I’ll try to investigate it as far as I can until the trail dies out,” Shepard said. “You can only go as far as the leads will take you.”

If police are never able to catch up with a suspect, restitution can never be ordered, and the victim is left to pay the debt out of pocket.

“There are definitely some victims out there,” Shepard said.

Police encourage anyone who has received a similar enticement to have it checked out by a financial institution to ensure the check is valid, or information can be passed along to the police department.

“We would hate for anyone else to fall victim to this scam because the chance of tracking down the scammer is very slim,” Shepard said.

Jamie Belnap: jamieb@tooeletranscript.com